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Recollections of Kennedy

In the winter of 1980, I spent a couple of days riding on a campaign bus in New Hampshire with Teddy Kennedy.

The senator was challenging his own party’s president, Jimmy Carter, and the fight through the primaries was beginning on friendly ground in Kennedy’s own New England. This was near the end of an era when reporters and candidates traveled close together. These days, the campaigns have become too big, too ruled by security concerns and too careful about gaffes and unscripted remarks. Back in 1980, it was much more intimate. Kennedy rode at the front of a bus filled with journalists who could come up to him at any time and ask a question. I remember walking up to where he was sitting and snapping some photographs. The candidate, engaged in conversation with an aide, hardly noticed.

One evening, we rolled across the state line into Maine for a campaign rally. Kennedy bounded onto the stage and tried to whip up the crowd. His speech covered the same ground as other speeches I had heard him give, but somehow it fell flat. An inconsistent orator, Kennedy that night was off his game.

Thinking back to that speech now reminds me of a far more pivotal moment of the campaign — CBS reporter Roger Mudd’s televised interview with Kennedy in the fall of 1979 just before the heir to Camelot had announced his candidacy. Mudd asked him a simple and obvious question: Why do you want to be president? Kennedy gave a rambling, convoluted response. He meandered on and on, as if looking for a compelling explanation and, in the broadcast, Mudd just let the tape keep rolling. It was devastating and, at the time, I remember thinking: “If he can’t do better than that, this guy is not going to win.”

And he didn’t. Oddly, though, Kennedy ended up stealing the Democratic convention spotlight from Carter, even as he conceded defeat. I was fortunate enough to be there, too, in the press gallery in Madison Square Garden. Kennedy gave one of the greatest speeches of his life, won the hearts of the delegates and made Carter look like the real loser (which he proved to be in the general election). The closing words of that speech have been played over and over in the hours since Kennedy’s death was announced Tuesday night: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”

What if Kennedy had come up with an inspired answer for Roger Mudd? What if he had connected with voters the way his brothers, John and Bobby, had? What if he had beaten Carter and gone on to beat Ronald Reagan? The difference in the path of history that would have resulted is hard to overestimate. Take just one example: If, as some analysts believe, the Soviet Union would have disintegrated even without the push it got from Reagan, then credit for ending the Cold War may well have gone to the liberal Kennedy. How might that have altered the shape of U.S. politics in subsequent years? And where would Republicans be today without Reaganism?

My guess is Kennedy couldn’t have beaten Reagan. The political tide was shifting with a powerful undertow to the right in 1980. For Kennedy, that may have been just as well. A Teddy Kennedy administration could have been as compromised by the president’s personal flaws as was Bill Clinton’s.

Kennedy’s epic personality contained a range of passions that both debased him and, in time, reformed him. On that campaign trip in 1980, I took a side trip to Martha’s Vineyard and went out to find a wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. On a dark night 40 years ago, the drunken senator from Massachusetts drove off that bridge and a young woman drowned. Kennedy’s explanation for what happened at that bridge was even more uncertain than his reasons to run for president. Dark passions and the craven actions to which they lead are not easy to explain and impossible to justify in the glare of public attention. Yet Kennedy’s passion for public service proved stronger in the end. Perhaps not in the eyes of his enemies, but certainly in the estimation of fair-minded citizens, the senator redeemed himself in the final decades of his life. He became one of America’s greatest legislators and made the welfare of less fortunate Americans his constant cause.

I saw Kennedy one last time at a dinner in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago. I was seated near him at the head table and it felt like being in the presence of a figure out of history — someone who should be in Statuary Hall, not present in the flesh. When I talked to him, he was gregarious and witty and as human as any one of us. Now that he is gone, I’m hoping to find a good biography of the man. His story should read like the best of Shakespeare.

Edward M. Kennedy was a grand character on the American political stage — a man not larger than life; rather a man whose life encompassed tragedy, foolishness and a compassionate spirit in full measure.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..